As of a few days and detailed originally in an article from Kotaku, a ransomware group has hacked Rockstar and threatened to leak large sums of data if their demands aren’t met. Said ransom they want paid by April 14th, but Rockstar has come out and said they do not intend to pay the hackers anything, even saying the breach wasn’t anything they were too concerned about, simply stating “We can confirm that limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach“. The hacker group, known as “ShinyHunters”, are believed to be in their teens and specialized in such types of extortion and ransom. Said hackers have previously hacked into the cloud systems of other major corporate entities such as Microsoft, Ticketmaster, AT&T, etc., and are saying that due to Rockstar’s refusal to meet their demands, they will begin uploading the stolen data online. The files stolen have begun to appear on the dark web as well, and mostly appear to concern spending habits than anything GTA 6 related.
An article from BleepingComputer details the data leak even further, saying that the “primarily consists of internal analytics used to monitor Rockstar’s online services and support tickets (…) This data allegedly includes in-game revenue and purchase metrics, player behavior tracking, and game economy data for Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online. The datasets also appear to contain customer support analytics for the company’s Zendesk support instance“. It also appears that this incident is part of a larger hacking scheme against Anodot, a data anomaly detection company who are heavily involved with SaaS cloud platforms. The hackers managed to use stolen authentication tokens to access the stolen data, which came from the likes of Snowflake, S3, and Amazon Kinesis, with Snowflake telling BleepingComputer it had detected “unusual activity” that hit a small number of customer accounts tied to a third-party integration, which Snowflake later confirmed to be Anadot.
This wouldn’t be the first time Rockstar has suffered a major leak- back in 2022, a UK teen by the name of Arion Kurtaj released early gameplay and assets for GTA 6 online, doing so by gaining access to the company’s Slack chat. The judge overseeing his case decided to give him an “indefinite hospital order”, which basically means a life sentence, only to be released when doctors no longer deem him a threat to these multi-million dollar corporate entities. Arion was 18 years old at the time of his sentencing, and is diagnosed with autism. Although other charges were used in the sentencing, the main focus appears to be directly focused on Arion’s hacking of major corporate data. It begs one to ask if that is even remotely appropriate for someone of that age and of that crime to receive a sentencing like that, especially at a time where such targeted corporations have gotten away with significantly worse, including Rockstar’s massive layoff of staff that was allegedly due to them wanting to unionize.